Quick lesson on Mission/Vision

While teaching Professional Military Education for the Air Force for 5 years, you have got to spice up some lessons, especially if you are teaching that lesson every month or so.  Sometimes you try some analogies and they don’t work, but sometimes you hit the jack pot and make that lesson easy for everyone in attendance to understand. I’m here to give you one of my nuggets that worked very well. 

Let’s talk Mission and Vision Statements. I want to start by going over the basics of these and getting to a mutual understanding of why they are so important and how they can be utilized in every aspect of life/business. 

Vision Statement First! Yes we call them mission/vision statements, but you cannot and should not create the mission statement first. You must start with your vision. A vision statement can be described as “the end-state-the ideal state” of where you want to be. A goal, perhaps. In business these tend to be worded like “In order for us to be the premier authority on logistics operations in the 21st century……”. Analyzing that statement their “Goal” is to be the authority on logistics eventually. So they have an idea of where they want to go with their business.  A vision statement can be used for your personal goals to. Just grab on to something that you want to accomplish. Maybe a specific degree while you are working a job full-time. Possibly even you want to have 4 kids born before you turn 35 years old. Every goal can be turned into a vision statement. 

Now with your vision in mind you need to establish a way to measure you meeting that goal and a deadline.  If I want to accomplish a certain college degree by Spring 2020, I can now work my way backwards from 2020 and determine how many classes by the end of each semester I need to have done each step of the way. This is you creating your mission statement.  A simple definition or way to understand the mission statement is “your daily operations that get you to your objective.”  

Understanding the simplicity of mission/vision statements is as easy as understanding a recipe for your favorite dish or typing in a location into your GPS and following the waypoints.  Your favorite dish or the ideal location you are trying to get to is your vision statement, and the step by step or turn by turn directions is your mission statement. 

Now for my nugget of knowledge that makes it unbelievably easy to understand the difference and you will never forget this, I promise. Let’s talk the Wizard of Oz. You know Dorothy, Toto, the munchkins, and the wicked witch of the west. When Dorothy is stuck in OZ, where is she wanting to go? To the emerald city, to see the wizard of course! So her end-state, her ideal state, her vision statement is to get to the emerald city. Now that we have established the vision statement, we can focus then on our mission statement which is our daily operations in order to get to our vision.  So how is Dorothy going to get to the emerald city?  I seem to remember a saying from the movie and a little song….Follow the……yellow…..come on you almost got it…….brick ROAD! That’s right, Follow the yellow brick road is her daily operations in order to get to the emerald city. She only needs to focus now on her mission and not get distracted from it and she will eventually get to her vision. So let’s combine the two statements for Dorothy and create an awesome mission/vision statement. “In order to get to the emerald city to see the wonderful wizard of Oz, we must follow the yellow brick road.” So when you are establishing your business statements, or even your personal vision statements, first determine what is your emerald city? Then figure out what your yellow brick road is going to entail. Done and Done. Peace and Love